


Mirror, Mirror

by mrstater



Category: Chalion Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: F/M, Innuendo, Romance, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-13
Updated: 2011-04-13
Packaged: 2017-10-18 00:49:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/183164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mrstater/pseuds/mrstater
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>No one had offered him a mirror by which to examine the cause of all this female hilarity.</i> Cazaril at last sees his clean-shaven face, but will he and Betriz see eye-to-eye about his facial hair -- and the manner of their betrothal?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mirror, Mirror

****"Betriz?" murmured Cazaril against his newly betrothed's lips. They were so soft and supple, and the _hmm_ she half-sighed against his mouth so husky with pleasure, that he had to kiss her again...and again...They'd had chance enough for discussion during the year of their acquaintance, but for each, there was a lost opportunity for kissing to make up for. His curiosity could wait, for now; these kisses could not.

Deepening the kiss, allowing the tip of his tongue to _just_ slide between Betriz's lips to trace the inner edge of her mouth, he tightened his arm around her waist, holding her securely in his lap, while his other hand fingered her elaborate coif of silky ringlets she'd worn for Bergon's investiture. When the backs of his Cazaril's brushed her smooth cheek, however, and he felt the pads of her fingers rubbing over his own clean-shaven jaw line, inquisitiveness once again took possession of him over passion.

"Betriz," he said again, raising his head to peer into her eyes, rich and dark and blinking hazily at him from within their frame of long, curling lashes. Cazaril's insides buckled -- a far pleasanter physical sensation than he'd experienced in recent months, with Dondo and the death demon residing in his belly. But now they were gone, and _he_ and _his_ kisses were delightfully responsible for Betriz looking like that; it was _his_ cheeks upon which she wished to bestow her tender caresses.

 _Cheeks -- right._ One last kiss -- oh, all right, then, _two_ last kisses, if Betriz insisted; it was beyond Cazaril to deny her now the Royina had granted Betriz his hand as a boon -- and no more straying from the matter at hand.

"I don't know how I look," he said, and, at Betriz's brows knitting in confusion, clarified, "Without my beard."

"Oh." Cazaril just glimpsed her smile dimpling as she leaned into him, brushing her cheek against his. "Handsome."

Her breath made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. He felt her shiver in response as he chuckled into her ear.

"As much as I appreciate your assessment, I rather meant I'd like to see for myself."

Betriz sat up and regarded him from beneath a raised eyebrow. "Don't you trust my judgment?"

"There's no accounting for taste. After all, you didn't appreciate my quatrain to your nose."

Said nose crinkled in an un-lovely snort as Betriz disengaged herself from Cazaril's embrace. Before he could grasp the arms of his chair and push himself to his feet, she'd made her way through his suite of rooms as familiarly as if they were her own (Cazaril realized she'd likely taken charge of preparing the quarters for his arrival at the Zangre) and brought out the gilt-edged mirror that he'd earlier noticed in his dressing room.

"You see?" Betriz said, holding it before him. "Handsome."

"Hm." Cazaril ran his hand slowly over his cheeks and chin, leaning forward to scrutinize the man gazing back at him from the polished glass. "He looks like a fellow I used to know." _A lifetime ago. Before imprisonment and slavery._ The marks of which he indelibly bore in lines on his face and streaks of gray in his hair -- not to mention the ropes of scars marring the flesh of his back.

But even Cazaril couldn't argue with Iselle's earlier assessment that he -- if this reflection really did belong to him -- seemed to have shed a decade or more since the Royse ambushed him with his barber. Perhaps not the full fifteen years the Provincara had estimated last spring in Valenda, but the face in the mirror didn't look _so_ inappropriate alongside the young lady who held it.

Still... "I don't know as I ever heard anyone call him _handsome_."

With a _hmph_ of great annoyance, Betriz withdrew the mirror. Cazaril hadn't quite finished with it, but suspected no matter how long he studied his reflection, he'd never see himself the way Betriz did. She stood the mirror upon Cazaril's desk, atop his correspondence. Well -- not _his_ correspondence any longer.

" _I_ called you handsome," she said, facing Cazaril with hands on her hips.

"In that case," he said, reaching out to take those rounded hips in _his_ hands and pull her once again into his lap, where he couldn't believe he hadn't been keeping her all along, "it must be so."

He pecked the tip of her nose, and Betriz gave him a mock glare that was utterly belied by her dimple.

"Would you still have asked for my hand if I'd refused to give up my beard?"

"Would you have declined mine to keep it?"

"The Five Gods spare me from such foolery!" Cazaril said dramatically, but for a moment Betriz looked at him as if to say the Gods _hadn't_ spared him from equal foolery in his prior rejections of her. Abruptly, her gaze dropped to her lap, and the dimple vanished from the corner of her mouth.

"If Iselle had offered you the Chancellory first, would you have sought my hand? I mean..." Her lip caught between her teeth. "Did my forwardness offend you?"

"Offend me?"

"Ladies don't arrange their own marriages."

"Unless they're Iselle?"

Betriz laughed a little, but the eyes she lifted to Cazaril were wide with uncertainty. "Common girls don't arrange their own marriages."

Cazaril caught up her hands and pressed his lips to each of her knuckles. "You, _my_ lady, are no common girl. And if you'd offended me, I shouldn't have accepted you." He couldn’t resist adding, with a squeeze of her hands, "Not that I had much choice in the matter, given that the Royina bid it."

Arms sliding over Cazaril's shoulders to twine about his neck, Betriz said, "I'd have asked for you whether you were to be Chancellor or not."

"I know," Cazaril replied, choked. He was sure Bergon himself had not felt more deeply honored by his lady's request of his hand. "And had I known all you required of me was a trip to the barber..."

"Since you first kissed me, I've never been less than candid about your beard," said Betriz, dimple restored to her smile and a fair measure of wickedness in her eyes.

"I've been slower to learn the language of love than you've learned Roknari, it's true," said Cazaril, "but I _am_ learning. You see, just before you all barged in here, I was imagining that the Royina had no further use for me in her court, and what I was most loath to lose was not the employment, but _you_. I'm sure my imagination eventually would have prompted me to take you away with me, to live the life of a pauper with a failed poet."

Betriz giggled and squeezed herself against him as she titled her face up to his for a kiss. Cazaril obliged -- it was impossible not to, when her breasts in her low-necked formal gown her pressed sensually against his chest -- but somehow he found the wherewithal to keep it brief and relatively chaste. He shifted his leg beneath Betriz to indicate he wished to rise, and she slipped off his lap, looking at him mostly with happiness, but a little askance, too, as he gripped the arms of his chair and, groaning softly in a fashion that aged him if his beardlessness had shaved off a few years, pushed himself upright.

"If you don't mind, since I _am_ the Chancellor of Chalion..." _Chancellor Lupe dy Cazaril_...It would be a long time before he got used to the sound of that -- much as he liked it. "I would like to ask for your hand properly."

Betriz's dimple depend, and her eyes shone as though with starlight. Cazaril would have to write a poem about her eyes, later. "Not at all."

With a crackle of joints, he dropped to one knee and took Betriz's hand.

"Lady Betriz," he began, then stopped, realizing he hadn't the faintest notion how to proceed. A formal, painfully stilted speech began to formulate in his mind, but he couldn't imagine making such a tedious proposal to Betriz. So he said:

"I still am not worthy of you, but I've loved you almost since the moment I set eyes on your exquisite nose. Will you consent to be my wife, so I may write poetry to all your lovely features till the end of my days?"

Betriz reached out her free hand touched it to Cazaril's forehead. "Are you sure you have no fever?"

"Quite sure, my lady."

"Then I do consent. But Five Gods, Caz!" she cried, tugging him to his feet. "It's lucky you're handsome. Maybe it'll distract everyone from how deranged the Chancellor is."

Cazaril grinned as he bent to kiss her and caught their reflection in the mirror on his desk. They _did_ make rather a lovely couple, didn't they? "Provided I don't stand on the tall towers of the Zangre and shout poetry to your nose."

 _  
_


End file.
